Thursday, April 18, 2013

Multiplayer Game 'Eve Online' Cultivates a Most Devoted Following

To make purchases within Eve, players use a currency called ISK, also the acronym for the real-world Icelandic krona. The total value of goods produced by activity inside of Eve per month is about ISK135 trillion, or $5.2 million. Millions of items are traded—minerals, booster rockets, armor, warp drives, and spaceships that cost upwards of $10,000.
In a first for a gaming company, CCP hired a proper economist to manage all of this activity. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson left his post as dean of the faculty of business and science at the University of Akureyri to work full time at CCP in 2007. Guðmundsson loves his job. He’s an economist who can monitor every sale of every good in a bustling market in real time. “Our mission statement is to make virtual worlds more meaningful than real life,” Guðmundsson says. “For me, real life has stopped being interesting. The economy of Eve is what I care about.”